Note: Updated this after hearing from one Pacific League team about the status of foreign amateur acquisitions.

The sellout crowds at Tokyo Dome from starting from March 15 to see the Hanshin Tigers’ and Yomiuri Giants’ exhibitions against the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers are a testimony to the fact that Japan, or at least the Yomiuri Shimbun, which is promoting the Major League Openers at Tokyo Dome, has come to peace with the fact that Japanese baseball will never seek to rival MLB.

The games, culminating with a two-game series between the Cubs and Dodgers and their five former Nippon Professional Baseball stars, are a symbolic surrender, as if the Tokugawa Shogunate not only welcomed Commodore Mathew C. Perry and his black ships’ incursion into Japan’s home waters but sold tickets to a parade in their honor.

For fans, the games’ attraction is undeniable. Five Japanese stars, including Shohei Ohtani, arguably the best baseball player ever, symbolize the quality Japan can produce. But on the flip side, their status as returning heroes for a foreign baseball power symbolize the fact that Japan’s major leagues are content to be second rate.

Don’t get me wrong. Japanese baseball is really good, really hard and really entertaining. It is a quality product. But it is also one whose proprietors show little desire in improving. NPB’s current mantra is: “Let’s have the best baseball we can while losing our best players to MLB, because we won’t spend one penny more to actually compete with MLB in terms of quality.”

A little history

NPB’s business model is a baseball version of the United States’ first governing agreement, the Articles of Confederation in that it subordinates the interests of the whole to the whims of the most powerful partners.

Yomiuri, since Day 1, has taken advantage of this situation to turn the pro baseball business into an analogy of Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate, which petrified the country’s social system as it existed on Oct. 1, 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu decisively defeated his principal rivals for national power at the battle of Sekigahara.

For 250 years, the Tokugawa clan ran Japan through a divide-and-conquer system that ensured they would be the big fish in the Japanese pond by impoverishing the other clans, monitoring them closely to ensure they never acted in concert and banning virtually all interaction with foreign countries.

This latter policy, however, proved to have fatal consequences when the U.S., led by Commodore Perry, and its technologically advanced European rivals came calling in the middle of the 19^th century.

For 89 years, Yomiuri has pushed rules and policies that curbed overall growth and development by guaranteeing each team exclusive rights to its home game broadcasts and merchandise income, making it harder for NPB to market lucrative joint broadcasting and licensing deals, limiting the growth of those channels that could benefit all teams.